A/N: Different writing style. I'm trying new ways to write because I'm unsatisfied with how I write.. so tell me what you think. It's kind of sloppier than before, but more feeling. I love feelings, so.. tell me what you get from this. Thanks for reading. Sorry for typos. -Taryn

09: Blame

He blames them.

He hates them so much it hurts. His heart beats with his fury, fast and breathtaking and the air is tight in his throat, grappling to keep him alive. All he wants is to turn time though. To live in his dreams, to get lost to fantasies of a boy who has lost everything.

But he can't.

He can't because of them.

They took it all. His memories are nothing but a murky land of shining lies and dark, corrupted shadows, that are like creatures, clinging to him, to his mind, their claws shining silver razors, cutting away the good and spitting in the bad.

Except he knows now. He knows that she's not a mutt. He looks at her and sees the scarlet tears fall from blood-shot eyes, and he knows that she can't be a mutt. Not when she's dying in front of him, so human. So very human as she coughs and hers lips are painted red by her pain.

He blames them. All of them. Every single citizen that ever turned their head at the mention of her name, that ever called her their Mockingjay. He blames Panem, and the Capitol, and theirs friends, and their families.

She is weak in his arms, rattling with each breath. But it is her eyes that haunt him the most, so tainted, so corrupted. War did this, the fighting led to this; he warned them, he warned them, he'd shouted at them and begged and pleaded for her to hear the words coming from his mouth. The war would end them. It would ruin them. The world would cry and suffer and they would never survive.

He blames them for making him right. And he hates that he's right. Too right.

How could they? Why wouldn't they? How could he doubt it?

There is plague in the land, seeping through the soil, poring from the mouths of moaning children, thin and starving. Blood comes first from the mouth, from the throat, thick and black and congealed. Then the nose, thinner, redder, nonstop. He remembers watching Haymitch bleed for days, a hand pressed to his face, coughing his way through the alcohol. He sits and watches the world die around him and feels guilt twist like a blade pressed into his heart, sinking slowly, with every death.

In the light of the plague, the war ended, because after the nose comes the eyes. The last and final step, of the dying, as the blood slips from the dying pupils of their victim. They weep for their loss, with their own blood; they weep for their loved ones that have already gone, and have given them this sickness. And he watches, silently, despairingly, pulling at his hair in his helplessness.

He warned them, he did.

The sickness rolls over the country like waves of a catastrophe. Corruption, twining its black vines through the peoples' bodies. A corset of death, squeezing the victim of the breath of life, stealing their fight, their personalities, rejecting the blood beating in their veins and spewing it from every place it can.

And he loathes it when she cries. He's always hated it; somehow he knows this, though he cannot truly remember ever seeing her cry, the memory taken from him. But he still knows he hates it because when she comes to him, in the last few moments, silent drops of blood falling helplessly from grey eyes that stare at him, just as powerless, hopeless, his heart falls to his stomach and his stomach drops through his feet, and he knows.

Her hair is tangled, wild, falling from its carefully tied braid. She's in her Mockingjay suit, but it's spattered with blood, and its still warm, and not all hers. Sobs rack out of her mouth, silently, chest shaking. She reaches for him, slumped against the wall of a house long abandoned in the Capitol, and he shrinks away from her at first, seeing the sickness in her. The plague took most of her physical beauty. Her skin is shallow and pocked along her knuckles, and her hair is matted and dull. The only thing that he can see that elicits old memories, old affections are her eyes, grey and hopeless.

We lost, they seem to say, I lost, I failed. I'm dying.

And the thing that kicks him in the stomach is her words, rasping, broken, "you win."

He wins? No. He never wins. He's lost everything; his childhood, his memories, her, the Hunger Games, the cease-fire, his family, his friends, his sanity. But he pulls her to him, because he's scared she will collapse, and she cries tears into his shirt, staining the fabric crimson.

He blames them, as he begins to cry, too, sinking to the ground with her corpse in his arms. He lays her there, and she is motionless. She is so.. frozen... and he thinks it's wrong, because she used to be so full of life, when she was angry or determined or at the peak of the war when she'd campaigned for the rebels. But that was before. Before Snow allowed the plague loose from the science labs, crawling across his country; watching from his mansion, as his precious city falls victim, first, and the rebel army, that fled, that spread it further, from district to district..

He blames them, for the loss.

And he blames himself because he warned them, because they didn't listen to him.

And he knows he should have tried harder.

He wipes the bloody tears from her cheeks and he kisses her forehead, tasting the sickness, sharp and bitter and real. His eyes screw shut. Her last words ever fall heavily on his mind, sinking through the layers of bad, the corruption, and he grasps her again, rips her to him, presses her familiar body against his and cries the harder; because she's right.

She's right, always right. He won; he was right, and wins and she is dead just like he first wanted when they'd met again. But not really. He doesn't want that now. He wants her to suddenly breathe and move and live, and kiss him.

But he can't. And he has no one to blame for that.